Research and Teaching Updates from the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University.

Friday, December 14, 2012

2012-12-14: InfoVis at Grace Hopper

I was selected give a 5-minute faculty lightning talk at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in October in Baltimore. Short talks are among the most difficult to prepare, especially short talks for a general audience. I decided to increase my level of difficulty for the talk by combining two topics in my 5-minute talk, information visualization (infovis) and web archiving.

The faculty lightning talks session was new at Grace Hopper, but went very well. We had a 45-minute session and got to hear about 8 totally different research projects. Info and slides from all of the presentations are available on the GHC wiki. Especially for work-in-progress, this format was a great way for the speakers to really focus in on the important aspects of their work and for the audience to hear snippets about different research projects without any presentation being long enough to be boring.

The GHC wiki has a ton of information about the conference, including notes and slides for many of the talks.

I hadn't been to GHC in about 5 years and was amazed to see how much it had grown. There were over 3600 attendees (1500 students) from 42 countries. Happily, even with that many people, I was able to meet up with all of my old friends.

The highlight of the conference for me was Nora Denzel's keynote on Thursday morning. It's recommended viewing for all, but especially for female students in CS or Engineering. The video is embedded below, but if you'd rather read about it, here are some blog posts it generated: Aakriti's blog, Valerie's blog, and Kathleen's blog.